Shauna + Tim + 2 Bunnies

Friday, March 23, 2012

Eco Tip: Cord Wrangling and Energy Saving

It's Friday, Friday! I hate myself a little bit every time I wake up singing that every Friday, but whatareyougonnado???

Hey look Tim's finally wearing a shirt on the blog! He was changing out our monster cable cord for a much shorter one, because we've had like 80 extra feet of cable we've had to hide behind stuff to keep it from the bunnies.

Rockin the whole grandpa look, nice. He knows how to bring the seduction to changing cables.

Anywho, I'm here to talk about how we outfitted our console table with the 8,834,182 cords we need to keep ourselves entertained 24/7. We have a pile of cords that

A. Needed more outlets space than we have,

B. Needed to be easily unplugged so that we're not wasting electricity when they're not in use, and

C. Needed to look presentable and organized.

Tim found this cord wrangler that would fit our needs perfectly:

It has a shelf at the bottom for your surge protector, and then a big area to wrap all the extra cords around before feeding up to where you want to use them.

We use surge protectors with a switch that you can use to shut off the electrical flow to the cords when they're not in use. Remember that if you have something plugged in, there is always wasted electricity flowing until you unplug it. Or use a surge protector with a switch. Otherwise, we're all just converting lots of energy into wasted energy and throwing money away on our electricity bill.

Why are all our chargers and power cords so different from one another? We've got the Playstation and Apple TV cords, my Droid charger, Kindle charger, IPad charger, and MacBook charger and none of them are remotely similar!

Anyways, we planned to mount that cord case underneath the console table we recently built. We also had to tuck away the cable cord to keep the bunnies from chewing through it.

So, I used some of those cool tack things they give you with the cord to hammer it neatly along your baseboards or where ever else you want to feed the cord. I used it to hammer the cord up against the bottom of the table.

Then we mounted the cord box directly under the table and next to an outlet:

Voila! We mounted the power cord of the surge protector under the table as well, away from those precious bunnicaulas we call pets.

On the shelf, I fed up the chargers for the Macbook, IPad, and Kindle. I could make them prettier looking, but you barely see them unless you're taking photos from this angle.

Then on the top, I brought my phone charger through so I can continue to keep it charging 24/7 since the battery only lasts 5 minutes (November, come quicker!).

And there you have it! I wanted to make a cool little charging station because they're so cute, but it just doesn't work for our needs. Most of our chargers in this station are for big bulky items that we keep on the shelf when not in use, so it doesn't make sense to house them together. Do cords drive anyone else crazy as well? Why haven't we all invented invisible cords that change to bright orange while we're trying to find them?

Check out how we used a cover to hide cords along our open walls here, and more projects here!